To The Surbiton Manor Born

New landscaping has triggered a pivot from garden to prairie here at Steepmeadow. It is amazing what a few weeks will do. Three weeks ago, we had a pile of mud, clay, and rocks, and no steps down from our patio door to the yard, just a precipitous bone-breaking fall. The removal of the collapsing, not up to code deck and the carpentry to repair the damage to the house from the not-up-to-code attachment left us $6,000 poorer, and looking at an eyesore. Probably the most unsatisfying $6,000 we've ever spent. Flash forward. Steps are built.  We filled in the clay/mud/rock zone where the deck used to be with topsoil, and we got a mix of the poor man's bee lawn (Dutch white clover, red creeping fescue & sheep fescue) and quick grass to grow. Aug. 9 Aug. 16     Aug. 26 The ultimate plan for the space came with a realization and a pivot.  While I do believe you could make yourself self-sufficient on 1/4 acre of land, the intensity of the cultivation is prohibitive. We h...

Scene of the Destruction We seem to have come through our late July heat wave, and Steepmeadow's garden is doing pretty well in spite of record high temperatures for a record length of time and the smoke that descended on us from the burning Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. The tomatoes are starting to produce.  We have a bed full of healthy lettuce, which is a good thing, given this year's as yet uncontained cyclospora explosive diarrhea outbreak . It turns out that, unsurprisingly, the root of the problem is a massive factory agribusiness that uses slave labor, Taylor Farms .  We have peppers and eggplant that are just waiting to pop. We have winter squash and pumpkins that are starting to pop up. The yard is producing a bumper crop of creeping Charlie.  In mixed news, we had our old, sagging, rotting, not-up-to-code deck removed, and significant expense. It ranks as one of the most miserable, least satisfying expenditures of all time in our money pit home.  ...

All is not especially well here at Steepmeadow.  The Japanese beetles have been out in force, trying their best to destroy our fruit trees and raspberries, and generally being hideous to look upon.  We have had a near record run of 90 degree days (32 degrees Celsius, if you live in a civilized part of the world). 77,000 acres have burned (so far) in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, and we have been choking on the fumes. I'm painfully aware of this because that was where I was supposed to be with my kid for our annual vacation this past weekend.  Instead of the BWCA, we went to Myre-Big Island State Park near Albert Lea near the Iowa border. It was lovely in many ways. Very, very hot (90's & humid). But the prairie is a gorgeous place, too. Many flowers. Many, many birds (including pelicans!). But there was Eurasian milfoil, coating the murky Albert Lea Lake.  Back on the home front, we lost our zucchini to irregular watering. Containers are apparently t...

It is raspberry season. We have a lot of raspberries. Indeed, raspberries are currently coming out of our ears.  We also have invasive Japanese beetles swarming the plants. Those beetles also really like our apple trees, which we just had to cover with large white bags, which catch the ever-loving constant howling wind like a sail. Hopefully, we will not break the trees, and save them from the depredations. Hate these things  This year, we did get Rainbow Tree Care to come out and spray for the horrible grubs that these things spawn from. Whether that works remains to be seen, as they just did it last week. You step away from the garden for a minute this time of year - or maybe more like a week - and bam! Things are overgrown and full of weeds. Destination for out of town time - not the garden. There is a project underway which will reshape the Steepmeadow we have known. The rotting deck is scheduled for demolition tomorrow. This will have the effect of opening up a bunch of s...

So it is the end of the three day Memorial Day weekend, and I have barely sat down since Friday. In fact, the frenzy began last week when the long awaited (ordered in January) pollinator garden from Prairie Moon Nurseries arrived. Long have we wanted to put in a garden of native flowers and plants. Finally pulled the trigger last winter. The thing is, I had not prepared the bed where we wanted to put these between the apple trees. The wind was howling. It was cold. It was threatening rain. I spent a LOT of time ripping up creeping Charlie and dandelions. Wednesday, the plants went in. In the same cold wind.  The good news is that the weather changed Saturday. I was able to deal with a project that has sat there taunting me for a long time.  The situation was this: the patio outside my office window was covered with piles of wood chips from splitting wood all winter long. While this stuff makes excellent mulch (see above - no weird colors or dyes, just plain, natural wood) the...

I hate the spring. Not all of it, of course. But the bit I really hate is the wind and the cold happening when the sun is shining so brightly and things are greening up.  For instance, last Saturday I ran a half marathon in Eau Claire (a lovely time, and a nice town, decent performance - for me - of 2:09:33). I used sunscreen. I saw a lot of people who didn't turning pink. It was 50's at the start, and it warmed into the '60's. Perfect event weather, in my opinion.  After the race and after a nap, we went for a walk around town and in a park. The wind had picked up to gale force, so it was impossible to read a book outside.  We endured mornings in the '30's this past week. Jackets. And the never ending firewood. It's necessary to have a fire every night. Still. In theory, this changes next week. I will believe it when I see it. I do love it every year when the crab apple tree outside of our bedroom window blossoms. But something is off this year. Usually, it...

Slowly, and in fits and starts, the weather is turning. We're still getting snow showers and threats of inches of the stuff, but at the same time, the grass in sunny places is starting to green up. Daffodils are popping up, as are tulips. Time to get some maintenance accomplished and some things in the ground. Today, I put arugula, spinach, and carrots in the ground. Next weekend, or the weekend after, the snow peas will need to go in. Hence I did some maintenance on the trellis (which was somewhat the worse for wear after last year.  Is there anything that you can't  fix with zip ties and chicken wire?  Another outdoor task was to clean up a lot of the tarps that were sort of strewn around the patio after a winter of covering wood, which has now been burned.  Eggplant, two kinds of peppers, and tomatoes are humming along nicely in the greenhouse.  State of the world is terrible, as expected. The geniuses in D.C. decided that masked fascist white supremacist goo...

 This is an image of the Little Snowblower that Could. It began snowing last night about 5:00. We awoke with more than a foot of snow on the ground this morning when we woke, and another several inches on the way. It's still snowing right now (3:00 on Sunday afternoon). It does not show any signs of letting up. This image is currently in the lower left-hand corner of my computer screen: We will probably have to take the wee electric snowblower out again later on. 2" it can handle easily. It really is a lifesaver - or, perhaps more to the point, a back saver. Got it for about $100 six years ago when we moved in. Worth every penny.  Significantly, it doesn't have a small gasoline engine. I hate those things. Is it the pollution? Or is it the fact that stupid small engines are always broken. And then you bring them to some rough-boy, at great expense, who will look at it thoughtfully and talk about stale fuel in the tank, or the carburetor, or the plugs, or whatever it is tha...

The painstaking and surprisingly lengthy process of planning what to plant this summer has begun.  This year we will once again be taking into account the lessons of previous years, mostly in an attempt to stop wasting space and growing future compost. Specifically, this will entail planting just one or two zucchini plants (not 6), a banana pepper plant or two (not half a bed), fewer purple pole beans, and no lousy kale. We never seem to eat it. Crop rotation is going to take the form of "don't plant the same thing in the same place two years in a row." It might be a little bit lazy, but it should get the job done. I'm going to try to get our salad greens out of the direct sun. We've had two years of mediocre harvests, and I think it was because they got scorched in the hot beds down the hill. This year, up by the house where they will get a little bit of shade. We'll be revamping the patio area, which will entail moving a raised bed there and cleaning up the ...

It's Martin Luther King Day at Steepmeadow. Most of the outdoor work right now consists of processing wood for the wood stove. It is consuming a great deal, and we're just holding the house at 65 degrees. It's classic January. There was a sale at Seed Savers Exchange , so I purchased most of what we will need for the summer's garden. We have pumpkin, bean, and pepper seeds that we saved from last year. So not terribly expensive this year.  We are in the depths of winter, and plagued by ICE. The federal government has invaded Minnesota with their masked Gestapo kidnapping our neighbors off of the streets.  To paraphrase Henry Rollins on misogyny (also true and exacerbated at the moment), I hate white supremacy, and I see it everywhere.  Normally I try to stick to gardening on this platform, but the whole point of self-sufficiency is to be prepared for emergencies. We are in one now. We don't know what tomorrow will bring. The MN National Guard is on standby to be dep...

(Kiki's Christmas Drawing) Some might say that it is a little chilly outside. This is actually a heatwave compared to Friday and Saturday. We had minus 13 overnight last night. I can confirm that cars with electricity and bitter cold don't mix very well.  We've burned through the last of last year's wood. Four bags a day this weekend (usually three are sufficient.) Got to keep the home fire burning.  Kiki made chili and curried pumpkin from the summer's vegetables and froze it away for easy good weekday meals. It was a good year. Satisfying to still be eating from the garden. Fingers cold. Brain frozen.   

Princess Poppyseed Watson enjoys reclining on the mantlepiece on cold winter days. She will probably be sitting up there regularly until June. We received about six inches of snow over this Thanksgiving weekend.  I was waiting for the strawberry plants to die back to brown. They were still green when the flakes began falling, so I did not get a chance to cut them back this year. I did bury them in straw before the snow came too hard. Hopefully they will be alright in the spring. I had forgotten what a pain in the neck the electric snowblower is to handle. Perhaps in windless conditions it would be easy. There are almost never windless conditions in Minnesota. There's always snow flying into your glasses, drifting over to the neighbors' clean driveway or blowing onto parts of it that you already cleaned. With a large driveway, the blower is really a necessity. It could be done with a shovel, but we are not spring chickens. Everything just gets harder in the winter. I discovered ...

This is the sky that I was shaking my fist at last weekend. While they don't show up in the phot, little snowflakes were falling (no accumulation).  All of the leaves are now gathered. At least those that I gathered. There's a school of thought that says "leave the leaves." I pick up the leaves for the most part, because I don't think that letting them get matted on the lawn will be helpful. But the last bits I mulch so there's a light leaf cover.  Today marked the day when I was planning to bring the leaves to the leaf dump. Showed up 10 minutes after they opened. On a Sunday. Bad move.  There was a line a mile long, and Kiki & I abandoned it. The van is sitting in the garage, stuffed to the gills, and ready to go tomorrow when it will hopefully be possible to approach the leaf dump. Not Plan A.  Another little piece of learning: It turns out that you want to clean your solar panels periodically. There's a miracle solution that is specifically designe...